3/5 ★ – QuilDewIvy's review of Guitar Hero.

Mastered meaning did all difficulties, nothing like FC'ing every song (not for lack of trying, i got 4 FCs on Expert total). It's alright. It's definitely the series' first outing in every sense of the word. Charting for every song is extremely sketchy if not outright bad at times, with quite a few songs with weird note placement. The most egregious example is actually a song you can only unlock through cheating, that happens to be the hardest song in the game just by how badly the chords are charted. The input detection is also really bad, something that's fixed in later games. There's a weird sense of heart and soul in this game, about 2/3 of the songs are covered, and while these covers largely strip the original's songs' feelings and vibes to be replaced with this lethargic studio-made energy, there's still an honest attempt at remaking the music here. That still leaves a lot of the songs really boring to play and to listen to though (they fucked up Killer Queen how do you do that), practically only a few songs are really super fun to play through. But it really is a passion project, which can be extensively shown in the bonus songs, all of which are handpicked favorites from the creators' OWN bands. It's like a greatest hits of indie rock and in-house legendaries. It all contributes to this vibe that you're playing these songs in the garage with the band, weird audio quality and all. Combine that with aged as hell visuals and a lot of notes from the devs sprinkled throughout, it leaves this game somewhat worth playing instead of skipped for the future games. Although this is, probably, the worst of the lot (in terms of the series) regardless. It has the easiest, slowest lethargic selection of songs in the series, with only the fun fundamentals and few bangers keeping it afloat.